The UK’s Fastest Growing Indies: Videogaming 247

Co-partner Alison Grieve explains how Videogaming 247 was inspired to grow by local competition Grainger Games.

Videogaming 247 began life as a market stall, and in just three years the venture has grown into a successful two store business.

We’ve gone into the High Street having been a market stall. We opened a shop on the High Street in our first year, opened a second store in the second year and now we’re expanding online,” says Alison Grieve, co-partner of Videogaming 247.

Grieve has been inspired by the success of local competition Grainger Games, which started life in a similar fashion.

Grainger Games inspired us. They are local and started off on a market and seeing how well they are doing, we thought, if they can do that, we can,” adds Grieve.

It also helped that we have gone into smaller shopping areas with less competition.”

Because the store came into being just as the recession started, they have not noticed the drop in the market that its rivals have.

Because we’ve only been around three years, when we started we just thought that we were doing well. As we weren’t around before the tough times, we cant look that far back and compare. What we can look at is year-on-year and we are coming across trends, like Skylanders is not doing as good as it did last year.”

One of the biggest challenges starting up the store was with the lease, but now it’s stable, Grieve is looking at expanding even more.

Grieve says: We look to expand every year and this year we want to expand on what we’ve got. Possibly next year we’ll try for another shop but because we do retro, we are not just expanding forwards, we’re expanding backwards into our retro offering and that’s where online comes in."